Differences
by slyprentice
Summary: When Marty McFly wakes...Preslash.GeorgeMarty.


**Title**: Differences  
**Author**: Prentice  
**Rating**: PG  
**Pairing**: Pre-slash; George/Marty  
**Warnings**: Look at the pairing. Srsly. Also, unbeta'd.  
**Disclaimer**: I don't own. I don't make money. Etc.  
**Spoilers**: Back to the Future.  
**Author's Note**: I wrote this for my '25 days of Rare-Mas' challenge, which was to basically write 25 fics that included a rare fandom, rare pairing, or both. Feel free to participate at any time and please let me know if you _do_ participate as I'd love to read your fic(s)! Enjoy!

**Summary**: When Marty McFly wakes...

* * *

When Marty McFly wakes, it's like his life has been reformed. Long gone are the shattered pieces of an unhappy life – one that's filled with absolute envy, bitter disappointment, and a little bit of covetous longing – and in its place is a shiny platinum gold album of a life. A life that is good, is better, is best to anything he has ever experienced before he went back in time and changed – everything and nothing, apparently.

His parents are still married when he wakes, after all, and everyone who should be there _is_ but that's where the similarities end, really, because everything _else_ is different. People – ones he should _know_ better than anyone else on the planet – are different and when he wakes up and walks out to breakfast he can hardly even recognize his own brother and sister, who are so dissimilar to the ones he knows that it's like they're complete and utter strangers who just happen to look like someone he once knew.

They aren't even the biggest strangers, either. Biff, for instance, is hardly recognizable to the skull head he once was. He's meek and mild like his own _father_ used to be and yeah, maybe Marty gets a perverse pleasure in seeing the guy who used to make his father's life a living hell cower and fluster under his father's intense gaze – which, in and of itself, is something else that's _new_ and _different_ – but it's so foreign to what Marty remembers from the past that his hands shake a little when Biff hands him the _keys to his truck_.

Yet another new addition to his life – a truck that his parents bought for him, that he remembers wanting so badly he could taste in his old life, and now here it is, ready and waiting and _buffed by Biff_ for god's sake and his parents, _his parents_, got it for him. George and Lorraine. Lorraine, who used to walk around with a glass of something –anything on the rocks from the moment she woke and parked herself in front of the television, preferring the silted glow of its screen to the harsh unforgiving light of day. And George…

George…

Marty doesn't quite know how to wrap his mind around this new and improved version of his father. He's _outgoing_ and _confident_ in ways that his old man never was, in ways that a teenage George McFly never was, and here the man is goosing his mother in the kitchen, scolding Biff like he's a recalcitrant child, and looking at Marty in a way that makes him think that maybe his father knows – something.

What, he's not sure, but this version of his father is different than the last. The…other…George would have crumpled under Marty's gaze, probably told him outright whatever it was he knew, but this version is something else entirely. He doesn't (and won't) tell Marty what he knows – not that he's brave enough to ask just yet – because _this_ version of his father is a power unto himself.

The George McFly of this timeline is intense and passionate – two things he'd never thought to ascribe to his father, even after going back to 1955 – and so much more than what he was that sometimes Marty can only stare at the man: look at the naturally graying hair, the lightly tanned skin, the happy smile, the laugh lines around his mouth.

His father is happy – really, honestly, happy – and it's so alien to what he knows that the first time that they're alone together – on a grocery run for his mother, of all things – that Marty can't help but hug his father, clinging to him like a toddler, and say 'I love you, Dad' in a way he hasn't done in years. And so what if George just hugs him back and says 'I know, Marty' and runs a trembling hand through his hair, cradling him close. That's just the way things are now: different but the same.


End file.
